Bangladesh suffers with heavy energy crisis with the gradual expansion of economic activities of the country. The estimations and reserves of energy resources show future potentials but a small fraction of them are being utilized which proved to be insufficient. Moreover, the impact of climate change and environment pollution has also been significantly felt. As a result, the successive governments have aimed at formulating an effective energy policy which would address these concerns. The energy policies have also received extensive criticisms especially on the questions of energy export and methods of extraction.
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History
The first National Energy Policy (NEP) of Bangladesh was formulated in 1996 by the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral resources to ensure proper exploration, production, distribution and rational use of energy resources to meet the growing energy demands of different zones, consuming sectors and consumers groups on a sustainable basis. With rapid change of global as well as domestic situation, the policy was updated in 2004. The updated policy included additional objectives namely to ensure environmentally sound sustainable energy development programmes causing minimum damage to environment, to encourage public and private sector participation in the development and management of energy sector and to bring the entire country under electrification by the year 2020.
Energy conservation
The NEP called for conservation measures to be strictly enforced to ensure rational, economic and efficient use of energy. The major means of energy conservation have been pointed out as energy audit, reduction of wastage, demand management and efficient use. Experts have suggested to initiate the energy conservation act, which would significantly reduce the energy demand of the country.